Marine Corps Gen. JamES E. Cartwright doesn’t mince words. Widely respected throughout the Defense Department, he has a reputation for being straightforward and frank — although not everyone agrees with his views.
As commander of the Strategic Command (STRATCOM), Cartwright focuses on long-term implications and studies the history of an issue before making a move. He is philosophical and thought provoking yet often exhibits a sharp sense of humor. His public affairs chief says it’s nothing for Cartwright to reveal some new idea before an audience, leaving his staffers scurrying afterward to update their files.
For Cartwright, one of the military’s greatest combat challenges is getting actionable information to warfighters quick enough to increase the decision cycle. This requires changing culture, which he says is much more difficult than changing technology.
Defense Systems editor Dawn S. Onley talks to Cartwright about his goals for this year and how DOD must adapt to fight it newest adversaries.
DEFENSE SYSTEMS: You have spoken about how the interaction of the chain of command and the bureaucracy plays out on the battlefield. Can you elaborate on that?
CARTWRIGHT: The top piece to that is the construct or the idea that through time, and through conflicts as far back as you want to go, we’ve changed tools—you know gunpowder to machine guns to tanks to missiles to airplanes.
But, independent of the tools, what also has emerged is really a construct that says that if you can make decisions inside of your enemy’s ability to sense and make a decision, you have a good chance of outmaneuvering your adversary. And so decision time becomes a metric by which you judge your ability to be effective.
I’ll go to a business construct. When you go to business school, generally there’s a rule that says that the size of your headquarters or corporation is directly related to the ambiguity of the information it has to deal with. So, if there’s more ambiguity, the larger the headquarters. That’s an industrial construct, which slows down the decision process. So how do you start to reverse large headquarters with the decision cycles of the information age?
“If you’re unencumbered by bureaucracy, you can get up in the morning and say, ‘I want to end the world.’ ”
What we’re trying to do is understand a business axiom that was first articulated by Napoleon. Napoleon said, “OK, I’ve got to worry about logistics; I’ve got to worry about those people trying to understand what we call intelligence now, and operations. How do I bring all of these pieces together in a way that I can make a decision that’s actionable?” He built something that is now used by our military. In the joint world, we call it the J-codes—a department for personnel, intelligence and operations. They each look at the issues and then provide information to the boss, who has the opportunity to, as we call it, wash that information.
The problem is that we built our headquarters that way, but no commander can afford to wait beyond a certain point for actionable information in combat. You never have perfect information. You never know for sure the intent of your adversary.
What we’re trying to understand when trying to get a quicker decision cycle is how much context a commander needs to act on information faster than his adversary. How do you get that commander as much context as quickly as possible? How do you build a staff that can operate on timelines that are significantly faster than a business or the Napoleonic structure? And how do you do it so that you can pick up on false positives?
We have an adversary now that is not encumbered by a structured government, staff or headquarters. The adversary is not encumbered by any bureaucracy, and everybody uses the bureaucracy word and then kind of goes (pretends to spit) afterwards.
But the reality is bureaucracies introduce structure. If you’re a nation state and I’m a nation state and we’re talking about something we don’t necessarily agree on, I know that you have to do certain things for your nation state to take action. It introduces a structure that allows your adversary to understand your actions, understand how you come to decisions and then provide you with information and input that you can reasonably process. So there are good things about bureaucracies.
If you’re unencumbered by a bureaucracy, you can get up in the morning and say, “I want to end the world.” And nobody has to answer to you. We have to worry about organizations that have that, that can be swayed in major decisions with no bureaucracy to guide them. But how do we keep the value of bureaucracy and get speedy decisions to outmaneuver somebody without a bureaucracy?
That’s our challenge: disconnecting the chain of information—which feeds context to decision-makers from the chain of command, which assigns authority and allows authority and responsibility to be coherent—but allowing the bureaucracy to get the information to everybody so that you’re not worried about a system that was designed from the bottom up or the top down.
Then you look at the chain of command and say, “OK, who’s responsible and who has the authority to match the implications of this information with a solution to their problem? That’s what we’re trying to change because in peacetime we tend to mix the two and then come up with a common answer for both. The chain of command became the chain of information, and that’s really not efficient. No business could survive in that mind-set.
DEFENSE SYSTEMS: What are some of your goals this year?
CARTWRIGHT: World peace. To solve world hunger. And the staff is not going fast enough. (laughter)
You know, given the diversity of issues that we deal with, it’s almost not fair for me to pick any one issue. So I tend to come at major milestones.
The biggest focus over the next year has to do with information sharing and decision timelines and how you get them down and how we build a global organization that is agile enough to stay inside of a non-bureaucracy decision process. That’s a mouthful, but you get the sense of what I’m trying to get to. I have an adversary whose command and control is done on MyYahoo and answers to nobody. That’s my worst nightmare.
“The command is trying to put in place how we move the cultures—not the technology; the technology is relatively easy.”
How do you build an organization that doesn’t throw away all of the things in our Constitution—all the things that we value in privacy and openness at both ends of that spectrum in the name of somebody who would do us harm? If you give all of that up, you might as well be them. So how do you build these decision processes for that problem and understand the cultural implications?
DEFENSE SYSTEMS: Can you talk further about how you will meet your milestones while tinkering and adjusting the military and bureaucratic cultures.
CARTWRIGHT: As a military person, you’re used to the reality that as soon as you step across that line of departure, as you move out on an operation, the first thing you can always count on is that what you thought was true is not. Things change. So you train to be ready for that kind of environment, never knowing for sure anything is a baseline truth. That’s one thing for a military person; it’s another thing for your bureaucracies because they are put in place to give stability. And they resist change. And a good democracy has a tension between stability and change. The change is in place to make sure the bureaucracy stays agile and relevant. And, the bureaucracy is in place to make sure that it’s accountable. You want to keep a balance, but you want to build the agility as the world changes.
What the command is trying to put in place is how do we move the cultures, not the technology. The technology is relatively easy, but how do you move to a culture that is comfortable in an environment of change that is now—let’s just say we moved from agrarian to industrial to an information age. The speed of change in each of those is an order of magnitude different. It introduces into society an order of tension that until we resolve it can oftentimes results in conflict. Most people would say that our transition from an agrarian to an industrial society was spurred by the Civil War. I hope we don’t have to have a civil war, but there’s going to be tension as we move the cultures to the next level of interaction. I mean, our kids are comfortable with it, but we’re not necessarily comfortable with it, the entire culture is not necessarily comfortable with it and you’ve got this inherent tension in a democracy between the bureaucracy (accountability) and the engines of change that keep you on the cutting edge.
How we bring that to the military is the challenge that we’re trying to work our way through at STRATCOM. It’s all these things that now have global implications, that heretofore were really thought of on a theater basis. You don’t walk away from theaters, but what you do in the Pacific affects Europe and vice versa, so nothing is really isolated in many of these missions.
The reality is that when you look at Afghanistan, Iraq, hurricanes, pandemics, tsunamis, fires, Africa, South America and a smaller military, the problems got bigger. You’ve got to think globally. You’ve got to try to tie certain things together that make sense. And you’ve got to disaggregate those things that don’t really relate.
DEFENSE SYSTEMS: Can you give me your thoughts on Donald Rumsfeld stepping down as Defense secretary and Robert Gates replacing him?
CARTWRIGHT: Can you give me your thoughts? (laughter in the room) I’m a military commander. I have no political ambitions to which I aspire. I’m a Marine. I understand the chain of command and I’ll obey it. We will miss Secretary Rumsfeld, there is just no way around it. Independent of all of the media activities right, wrong, indifferent, there’s no judgment on the issues. Nobody comes into these jobs without major sacrifice and a willingness to serve. And he has done it repeatedly for multiple administrations, so his service to the nation should never be something that’s questioned. The other stuff are things that get questioned in a democracy. But I certainly salute his patriotism and his service.
To read more of the interview with Gen. James E. Cartwright, go to www.defensesystems.com and enter 133 in the Quickfind search box.
![1105 Media [happiness]](/images/ds1_pntmlogo.gif "1105 Media [happiness]"){kind=small}
